Many people probably don’t know I started smoking again a couple of months ago, after a break of more than 5 years. I mention it now as a way to add shame as an additional motivation to quit again. Last time I needed patches to wean myself off nicotine, hopefully this time I can do without (although I am feeling crazy anxious right now).
(original image sourced from )
If you haven’t heard of the alleged documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, it’s basically a slimy turd of a propaganda piece designed to sell the ideas that:
a) Evolution (or "Darwinism") is an outmoded theory being unfairly promoted by atheistic biologists who refuse to accept evidence that life and its complexity can be attributed to an intelligent designer, and
b) Evolution/Darwinism is a philosophy which leads to things like mass-murder, genocide, eugenics etc.
The star of the show is Ben Stein, an intellectual luminary whose credits include being a speech writer for disgraced former president Richard M Nixon, starring as the droning teacher in the 1980s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and hosting some shit game/reality shows such as Win Ben Stein’s Money and America’s Most Smartest Model.
Until now I assumed he was just another anti-science nutjob who failed to understand that intellectual freedom does not include the right to be paid to teach bullshit at an educational institution. But hearing some of the things he says in this I realize he is in fact quite horribly stupid, and more ignorant than the average 13 year old when it comes to science.
To clarify my position on stupid: there is nothing inherently evil about it per se… I harbour no ill will toward the stupid in general, except where they exercise their stupid in a detrimental way, and Stein’s attempt to rouse the heaving masses of latent stupidity against the scientific "establishment" is a very good example of what I consider beyond stupid and well into very fucking evil territory.
Some of the stupid things Stein appears to believe about the Theory of Darwinism (he believes these things enough to spout them in TV interviews and press conferences)
It’s kind of ironic that Stein is the host of America’s Most Smartest Model, where he plays the sneering intellectual tripping up models with trivial questions like "what is the square root of 144?"— The ignorance of the pretty boys and girls he mocks will never do the kind of damage that his own much more potent and willful stupidity might under the guise of intellectual freedom.
I finally got an about and contact link back on here, currently appearing in the page header with subscribe and search options as well (previously in the sidebar on the front page only). Apologies to people who have previously had to leave general enquiries in the comments on random posts, you can now send me private random messages whenever you like!
Hillary Clinton is annoying me and I don’t even live in the US. Theories that she is attempting to sabotage the Democrats’ election chances if she can’t win the nomination are starting to seem less far-fetched (the logic being that she can try again in four years after a disastrous McCain first term).
Just recently she decided to call Obama elitist since he refers to the bitterness and frustration of certain working class people. Speaking as someone who had to put up with a conservative government who took to labelling underpaid left-leaning secondary school teachers as elitist, this marks her as a total bitch in my books; it’s mere pandering to the anti-intellectual crowd, most of whom who wouldn’t vote Democrat anyway, and it also makes no sense for one mega rich presidential candidate to refer to another in this way— Pot… Kettle. etc.
PS I wish there could be some kind of representation for "the rest of the world" when you elect your presidents/administrations over there, because every fucked up Decision they make cause problems for us non-citizens as well, and a truly democratic leadership should be elected by ALL those whose lives they directly affect (including prisoners and convicted felons). How about 1 vote for every 100 foreigners? That would give the rest of the world the democratic power of about 40 million Americans— is that so much to ask?
Boo me for not updating for so long… I’ve been very busy which is one poor excuse (it really doesn’t take so long to bang out a post), but also I’ve been spending time with a certain someone, a certain female someone, and there is not a whole lot more I’m really comfortable saying on the topic apart from that she is rather nice. And cute. And ummm… significantly younger than me, so I simultaneously feel older by comparison and younger by association… It’s all good :)
So now I’m wracking my brain for other things that have been on my mind which I can blurt out for your reading pleasure, and all I have are bits and pieces… which will follow shortly in separate entries since I’ve realized that posts covering multiple topics tend to discourage comments.
But I am enjoying his company. I like cats but am not ready to adopt one of my own, since I can’t really say where I’m going to be more than a year ahead of time, and cat ownership can be a super humungous pain when you want to move. Buddy, as I call him, because he is my buddy, turned up over the Easter weekend, and has been hanging around ever since—perhaps because he is always hungry and I feed him tuna and smoked chicken. He has a collar but no tag, so I guess someone is probably worried about him somewhere. But should I snub him and assume he will find his way home?
I have seen too many of these bullshit "clocks" appear on BoingBoing over the last five years, and this is the final straw. My good friend Richard, who is one of the most moderate people I know, has been disemvowelled for posting comments to suggest that maybe Cory Doctorow gives Roger Wood a little too much exposure on the Grand Old Blog, with his cute but pointless assemblages of victorian garbage with timepieces attached.
This will not stand!
If they were actual clocks fashioned from brass bobbins and doodads maybe I would be a little more impressed, but in fact they appear to be merely pile after pile of cogs and bells and springs with prefabricated clock movements tacked onto them. The junk has no bearing on the function, which basically makes them "Repulsive encrustations of pointless ersatz nonsense" as another commenter so eloquently put it.
BoingBoing is not just a blog; it is a source of information for vast numbers of people (including myself) about what is new and interesting in the world. These clocks are neither new nor interesting. They are Cory’s indulgence, and have virtually no relevance to the community which BB serves and benefits from.
So what’s wrong with a little indulgence? Nothing of course— who wouldn’t exploit such a position to share their tastes with an audience in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. But this steampunk clock shit has gone too far. It doesn’t take a "genius" to make stuff like this, and to suggest otherwise is an insult to those craftsmen who believe in making something well rather than just making something for ironic hipsters to fawn over.
If you search BoingBoing for references to Roger Wood and his clocks, you get 185 results. This is about 180 too many in my opinion. If these clocks were so fucking great then I’m sure other people would be talking about them, but the only place I hear of them is BoingBoing, where it seems like there’s at least one "Roger Wood my greatest pal the master genius steampunk clockmaker has assembled another cluster of old junk" post per month.
These are just a few of the from google:
It’s exactly this annoying repetition which causes myself and others to deeply resent Wood and his stupid clocks… not because they are bad, but because they are nowhere near good enough to justify this incredible ongoing exposure. Fine, advertise them on the site, but for Christ’s sake stop pushing this as editorial content.
I am truly sorry if this post offends Roger Wood. I don’t think he deserves ridicule for his work per se. But the overwhelming praise he consistently receives for this stuff means that eventually, people like me are going to come to despise his work, for having it continually pushed in our faces as something cool.
And before I forget, a big FUCK YOU to an increasingly conservative BoingBoing. I can’t believe you would censor someone merely for questioning this ridiculous self-indulgence. [Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I used to think you were cool]
It’s a sculpture. With a clock attached. Enough already!
PS: BoingBoing you have single-handedly diluted the word steampunk into a pejorative term. Show some editorial standards, please.
To my American readers, I hereby offer my humblest apologies for being among the vast number of non-US citizens who labour under the assumption that Americans are somehow incapable of understanding irony. Having recently met one of you in person, I have had my ridiculous preconceptions exploded (and am now eating copious amounts of humble pie).*
Fortunately Stephen Fry has just written/spoken on this particular stereotype, and of course he puts it more eloquently than I ever could:
… if there is one misapprehension about Americans that annoys me more than any other, it is the lofty claim, usually made by the most dim-witted and wit-free Britons, that America is an — ho-ho — “irony free zone”. Let it be established here, this day, that no one, on pain of being designated fifty types of watery twat, ever dare repeat that feeble, ignorant, self-satisfied canard ever ever again. Americans are no more irony illiterate than Britons or anyone else and the repeated assertion (and it is no more than an assertion not a demonstrable provable fact) is no more than a pathetic symbol of a certain kind of Briton’s flabby need to convince themselves of their sophisticated superiority over the average American…
(link to full article)
We in other countries tend to see the very worst of your culture in the media, in your current administration, along with the hideous Fox News style media coverage and the repulsively sincere celebrity puff pieces on everything from Entertainment Tonight to 60 Minutes. This is of course no basis on which to judge an entire population, and so, in the spirit of reconciliation let me say:
I am sorry, and will sincerely try to avoid such prejudices from this day forward.
__________
* it may seem strange to change an opinion based on meeting just one person, but sometimes you don’t notice that you’re carrying a stupid assumption around with you until someone challenges it, and only then do you realize that it just doesn’t make much sense.
Like many people I watched the documentary film Super Size Me and was amazed at the effect that Spurlock’s 30-day McDonalds only diet had on him. It nearly killed him! What a dude for performing such an experiment! Stick it to the man! etc…
About a year later I turned on my television to see him hosting this vile show called I Bet You Will, where he hangs around college campuses and offers idiot students 20 bucks to eat their own vomit or perform other such stupid gross-out activities. I couldn’t reconcile how this dude with principles could involve himself in such execrable nonsense.
Until now. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid talks about follow up studies that did not demonstrate anything like the effect that Spurlock claimed in the movie, and busts a few myths about evil fast food vs regular normal food. It’s not that fast-food is particularly good for you; merely that if you can resist the urge to force-feed yourself then it’s really not [necessarily] so bad for you either.
This was a lot funnier in my head…
This is my attempt to exorcize a sexy demon who has lingered in the back of my mind for more than ten years, creating an impossible benchmark against which all others would be measured. I can’t guarantee that my recollections are accurate, but this is how I remember things…
It was a bright and sunny day in late ‘96, and there, framed in the doorway of my home and wearing a loose fitting cotton dress, was the most gorgeous girl I have ever met. The morning sunlight silhouetted her figure perfectly through the thin fabric, practically burning the image into my soul, and all at once I knew that I totally desired this person while never standing a chance in hell with her. Not least because I was living with my partner at the time, as well as a friend of hers from university.
The girl in question is the sister of said friend, so she would drop in from time to time. Once or twice I even saw her in pyjamas when she stayed over and slept on the couch. She would of course look even more attractive when she got up in the morning, just like sexy girls in movies with expensively rumpled hair pretending like people can look that good as they roll out of bed after a big night out. Now at this point my memory may be just filling in the gaps… but I’m pretty sure she even did that thing where she would sit at the breakfast table munching toast with her feet pulled up on the chair and her knees tucked under her chin.
Not only was she blessed with stunning good looks, she also had a voice and accent that could turn me to jelly. So on top of occupying the spot in my mind reserved for girl most hottest, she also holds the honour for sexiest phone conversation I ever had.
She called late one night to talk to her sister, who was out, and so we made idle chit-chat for a while, as was the custom in the olden days when people often had to answer phone calls that weren’t for them. I have absolutely zero recollection of the actual content of that conversation, but I recall that there was at least an element of playfulness about it, since after hanging up I felt incredibly good, with my neck tingling like I’d just had a great massage. I was and still am jealous of her ability to do that magic (she has since done professional voice-over work, not surprisingly).
Oh, and she was smart. Very smart I believe, although it’s not like I ever sat down to evaluate her IQ, but it’s pretty easy to tell these things (well okay maybe the fact that she was utterly desirable in every way made it slightly easier to notice her towering intellect). At the very least she had a quick, razor wit. In conversation she would frequently break into a evil manic grin, and her amazing electric smiley eyes would just nail me to the wall. She could ask ANY favour of me and I would bend over backwards to accomodate. To merely serve would have suited me just fine, as long as I could sleep at her feet (well ok I probably would have pushed for a slightly better deal over time).
The thing is, as I stated previously, I didn’t stand a chance with her. I had nothing with which to impress her, because I was just a nerd with a computer who never did anything even slightly reckless or exciting, and she was interested in something else, though exactly what I cannot say. I supposed that she was drawn to dark, brooding, self-destructive types, but I really don’t know, because to seek out such information would of course reveal my interest— which now that I think of it would probably not have been such a big deal, because anyone in their right mind when pressed would have had to acknowledge that they wanted to shag her; I wouldn’t have trusted anyone who said they didn’t, be they male or female. Maybe my feelings were obvious anyway from my conspicuous lack of interest in conversations about her. I really don’t know, and would be embarrassed to ask.
So anyway, I did what any normal person would do in that situation. I sought out tiny opportunities to be near her while completely ignoring the very real needs of my own relationship at the time. I listened intently to any conversation in which her name was mentioned. I either tarried or hurried if I thought it might increase my chances of bumping into her. And to what end? Did I think something was going to happen? No. What if something had happened? Well it wouldn’t have, but even if somehow hypothetically it had… the guilt would have destroyed me.
Seriously, I run on guilt, it drives me, but I need to keep it within safe levels otherwise I will explode in a babbling fury of apology and self-recrimination. Ultimately this crush did contribute in part to the break up of my own relationship some months later, although of course I could not admit it at the time (just admitting this now has my guilt levels elevated to unpleasant heights).
And so, for my sake and the sake of those who would be unfairly compared to you… blow out your candles, sexy demon, blow out your candles— and so, goodbye…
Or call me. Either is fine.
